Remote Registry Problem on Upgraded Windows Workstations and Servers

Jun 11, 2013, 8:37 AM -05:00

I was using a scanning
tool to scan some servers and workstations. I could pull some information from the scan, but
it would fail when attempting to collect information via Remote Registry. After checking that the Remote Registry
service was started and the firewall was not enabled, I attempted to connect to
one of the systems remotely using regedit instead of the scanning tool. The connection would appear to succeed, but as
soon as I attempted to click on an entry, I would get an error message “Cannot
open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE: Error while opening key.” [more]After doing some research, I found this
TechNet article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892192).
It explains that systems that were
upgraded from Windows 2000 may experience this issue because Windows 2000 ran
Remote Registry under the “Local System” account, while XP/Server 2003 runs it
under the “Local Service” account. Once
you give “Local Service” read access to a specific registry subkey on the
target system, Remote Registry works.